can you please explain the ways in which G+ is not usable? while it's got less users than FB, it's afaik generally perceived as far more user friendly, well designed, and feature-ful
It's like a cellphone that you cant call anyone with. No one really cares if it's 1000 times easier to use if you can't call your friends.
They took something benign but useless and made it non-consensual. Google+ is now the equivalent of all the cable channels you didn't want but your cable co made you buy anyway.
I was an early adopter of G+ because I didn't like the heavy handed BS from FB. I still begrudgingly use FB because alot of my friends are on it.
To me, G+ having a niche audience is a feature.
That's not a feature, it's a bug that google is trying to fix by shoving g+ down everyone's throat.
And now you know why they're unifying their account system under Google+. Being able to include everyone who has ever had a YouTube or GMail account in their social network means that suddenly, people you know _are_ on Google+.
This is nothing new. This is basically the sequel to the YouTube -> Google Account transition that happened a few years ago, except this time it's in a post Google Reader shutdown world so Google is no longer the darling of Hacker News and Reddit commenters.
- The site uses a lot of JavaScript but seems to assume everything will be loaded immediately. I've had days where my connection is slower than usual and the page looks like it's loaded even though it hasn't. The worst part is that the links are some of the last things to load, and the "everything in a tiny box" layout means I can't actually do anything meaningful without clicking a link.
- The site puts everything in tiny boxes and assumes that you want to view everything in that same tiny box. Actually, maybe they've eased up on this lately and I just looked and it doesn't seem as bad as it used to be, but clicking on a YouTube video in my notification feed still plays the video in my notification feed, which is brain-damaged.
- I thought the two-column layout was a ludicrous waste of space (and it confuses me anyway because there's no obvious pageflow), so I switched to the one-column layout. The one-column layout uses the same column width as the two-column layout.
- The sidebar on the left is apparently engineered to be as confusing as possible. It's autohidden even though it could be visible if the overall layout didn't have so much gratuitous blank space. The way you get to it is by hovering over what looks like a dropdown. If you mouse over to what looks like a dropdown and immediately click it before you realize that the UI is lying to you and it's not a dropdown, you'll accidentally go "Home" because that's what appears under your mouse. Even if that space said something else before you moused over it! (FWIW, Facebook isn't too wrapped up in their own cleverness to realize that maybe a sidebar should just be a sidebar)
- I was about to say that the site may be optimized for mobile at the expense of those of us using computers, but the iOS app isn't better. I haven't used it in awhile and have apparently blocked it out of my mind, but it's annoyed me in some way nearly every time I've used it, and in fact I have a notification that I'm not getting rid of right now because it would require me to use the stupid thing. Yeah, I realize they probably put more work into the Android app for obvious reasons, but c'mon (I guess it's better than the YouTube app, which I deleted after discovering that it apparently only wanted to play videos in portrait orientation, upside-down)
- A regular occurrence: "You have X notifications" (click notifications feed) "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work. In fact, no joke, this just happened, just now: Sign into YouTube from being completely signed out. Click notification feed. "Please [link]sign in[/link] to view your notifications." The link doesn't work.
- Speaking of YouTube, someone had the bright idea that there should be no character limit on posts, but that the only collapse link should be at the bottom of the post. "Just enough text to trigger an expand link followed by the full text of a public domain novel" is now the funniest troll I've ever seen.
- I started using my G+ account for real because of one community. It's literally the only thing I'm ever interested in when I visit the site. The first five or six times at least I couldn't figure out a better way to find the community than typing its name into the search bar. Even though I was following it and it was the only thing I was following. After that my desperate ad-hoc fix was to unsubscribe from all the autogenerated "What's Hot" type garbage figuring that at least one post from that community would be in my feed.
- I can't find a "no, I will not spam all my friends, stop interrupting me every time I log in with a full screen splash page to ask me you jerks" button
(FWIW, I used Hangouts recently and I actually liked it. In fact I had to use it all of once to prefer it to Skype. That's the worst part about this G+ fiasco; it's not just that I think G+ is bad, it's that Google's insistence on equating "unified login" with "Facebook knockoff that you will join or else" has singlehandedly caused me to hate the company to a degree that even I wouldn't have expected a year ago. I actually think it's too bad that Google's worked so hard to turn themselves into an anti-brand.)